Blog Questions

There seems to be a trend about blogging so I thought I’d throw in.

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

I probably started around high school. I was inspired by Major Nelson’s blog and the late Stephen Toulouse’s blog. I found the idea of just having your own space online to be pretty cool. I think that’s what mattered most. Like it was one thing to just post to Facebook or Twitter, but it was another thing to own your own space online. 

What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it? 

It’s a WordPress site. I like WordPress and got started on it after watching a Chris Coyier talk on the WordPress development flow. If we go back further, my high school’s newspaper website was on WordPress. It felt like the proper balance of customizable vs. having some pre-built stuff to build off of. 

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

Not very much. I spun up a Jekyll site and explored that. I’ve worked on a couple of other CMS systems but not for personal blogging. 

How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog. 

For the most part, I usually open Pages (or Word) and write in software design to be written in. For very short posts, I’ll write directly in WordPress.

Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?

Normally, I post immediately. There are some posts that are political and I usually sit on those for a day or so to be sure I’m hitting the tone I want to hit. I like the idea of a blog being high volume, and that means just posting. 

What are you generally interested in writing about? 

I find my posts fall into 2 categories. The first are technical How-tos. I find these to be most enjoyable. “Hi here is a code snippet that does a thing, isn’t that cool?”. I wish I did more of these. The other post is like a weird tech-vibes category. Tech has changed quite since I got started in the tech space and at times, I don’t like the direction of our space and I write about it. I don’t like these posts as much but I think they’re important. 

Who are you writing for? 

Me. I do it because I enjoy it. I hope…I hope my posts help people. Wether it’s a useful code snippet or a “oh someone else feels like me”, that’s a win too. 

What’s your favorite post on your blog? 

My favorite post is the post from when we got Dani. He’s my little dude and while it’s not related to tech at all. https://www.andrewoconnor.tech/so-we-got-a-dog/.

Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform? 

I considered moving after the stuff with Mullenweg and WPEngine started. I decided, that wasn’t the right choice for me but the idea does float around from time to time. The site could 100% use a redesign and that’s on my to-do list.